Review: Wallbanger by Alice Clayton

Title: Wallbanger
Author: Alice Clayton
Series: Cocktail, #1
Format: Kindle
My rating: 2 / 5
Pages: 314

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The first night after Caroline moves into her fantastic new San Francisco apartment, she realizes she's gaining an intimate knowledge of her new neighbor's nocturnal adventures. Thanks to paper-thin walls and the guy's athletic prowess, she can hear not just his bed banging against the wall but the ecstatic response of what seems (as loud night after loud night goes by) like an endless parade of women. And since Caroline is currently on a self-imposed dating hiatus, and her neighbor is clearly lethally attractive to women, she finds her fantasies keep her awake even longer than the noise. So when the wallbanging threatens to literally bounce her out of bed, Caroline, clad in sexual frustration and a pink baby-doll nightie, confronts Simon Parker, her heard-but-never-seen neighbor. The tension between them is as thick as the walls are thin, and the results just as mixed. Suddenly, Caroline is finding she may have discovered a whole new definition of neighborly...

In a delicious mix of silly and steamy, Alice Clayton dishes out a hot and hilarious tale of exasperation at first sight...

-- As seen on Goodreads

My Thoughts

Wallbanger was one of those books that was absolutely everywhere I turned last year. I saw so much praise, with 4 and 5 star reviews and I thought it would automatically be such a great read. I saw it on sale recently, and I thought I’ll give it a go. Unfortunately, for me at least, it’s a case of the hype being greater than how I found the book.

It’s a fairly familiar premise. Caroline is our main character and narrator. She’s a single girl living in San Francisco. She’s been missing her O for six months since she had a one night stand with Machinegun Cory. When she moves into the vacant apartment her boss owns, she becomes obsessed with the guy living next door who frequent has very loud sex with various different girls. Since the walls are paper thin, she gets a front row seat.

What drew me to this book at first was the humour that lots of people gushed about. I downloaded a sample last year, and I thought that I’d really like the book, but I didn’t buy it immediately. It took over a year for me to get around to it actually! I will say that, yes, the book is very funny… until the funny wears off. This is so contradictory to everything I usually rave about. I love funny moments in books! But, this is the thing: I love funny moments that don’t feel like they’ve been planned. I guess what I’m trying to say is that unexpected humour appeals to me more than predicted humour.

Unfortunately, I didn’t connect with any of the characters either. The highlight of the book was Carline’s cat, Clive. All the characters are super rich, and in honesty it’s become a bit boring reading these story lines. I kind of took an instant dislike to Simon, and I didn’t see anything to help me get over that. As he’s the main male characters, this is fifty percent of the character appeal gone very quickly. Caroline didn’t fare much better. And what is with the nicknames?! Wallbanger is pretty self-explanatory once you read the book, but whenever “Pink Nightie Girl” cropped up, I cringed.

I think this is a case of timing. If I had read Wallbanger last year, around the time I read the sample on Amazon, I think I would have liked it a lot better. I personally feel I’ve read better books that deliver on all fronts, from characters, to sexy-times and overall story. I will admit there are lots of funny moments, but I need more than humour alone to make me love a book.